County: Roscommon Site name: Abbeytown, Ardnanagh, Roscommon Town
Sites and Monuments Record No.: n/a Licence number: 24E0458
Author: Maeve McCormick
Site type: Testing
Period/Dating: N/A
ITM: E 587100m, N 763800m
Latitude, Longitude (decimal degrees): 53.623856, -8.195001
Archaeological Test Excavation was undertaken on 17th – 18th April 2024 on a site at Abbeytown, Ardnanagh, Roscommon Town. The site is a roughly rectangular shape measuring approximately 0.72ha sandwiched between the railway line and Roscommon train station to the west and the N63 Galway Road to the east.
Four test trenches were excavated across the site totalling 259 linear metres. Constraints comprising sewage works and large spoil heaps resulted in a change to the proposed trench plan which reduced the trenching from the proposed 300 linear metres to 259.
The northern third of the site comprised a warehouse and tarmac parking area. The central third of the site comprised a levelled stone area (C1). This was up to 0.5m in depth and had been laid across a recently cleared area. The southern third of the site comprised a modern layer (C2) of topsoil dump which contained modern detritus. Both the levelled stone and modern topsoil dump lay across an original mid-brown silty clay ground surface/original topsoil (C3) which measured up to 0.3m deep. This in turn overlaid a bright orange/yellow clay subsoil (C4).
Modern drainage ditches of varying depths and widths filled with cobbles or angular stones were noted across the site in all trenches (C5, C7, C11, C13, C15, C21 & C22). Some of these ditches contained sherds of glass or fragments of red brick. A modern rubbish pit (C14) filled with plastic and breeze blocks was recorded in Trench 2b. Two large agricultural furrows C18 (also labelled C19 & C24) and C20 (also labelled C23) were noted crossing between trenches T2a, T3a and T4. The parallel furrows were wide and deep. Their size suggests they could possibly represent lazy beds (furrows for planting potatoes). Two field boundaries which were recorded on the historical mapping were recorded during the excavation, C8 (also labelled C9 & C16) and C13 (also labelled C15). An additional field boundary, C6 (C10, C17 & C25) was recorded across all the trenches. This field boundary is not recorded on the historical mapping but it is worth noting that the plough furrows run parallel to and seem to respect this ditch.
Nothing of archaeological significance was recorded during the test excavation.
Archer Heritage Planning, Unit 1, Tenure Business Park, Co Louth A92 K2VF
